Текст книги "The Dark Tower"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 49 (всего у книги 52 страниц)

Patrick did not, but once the eraser was safely deposited in Roland’s pocket along with the watch, he seemed to forget about it and just went back to his drawing.

“Put thy picture aside for a little, too,” Roland told him.

Patrick did so without argument. He pointed first to the cart, then to the Tower Road, and made his interrogative hooting sound.

“Aye,” Roland said, “but first we should see what Mordred had for gunna—there may be something useful there—and bury our friend. Will’ee help me see Oy into the ground, Patrick?”

Patrick was willing, and the burial didn’t take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. By mid-morning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road which led to the Dark Tower.

Chapter III:

The Crimson King and the Dark Tower

One

The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high… but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time. Now, however, as the end draws closer, you must mark yon two travelers walking toward us with great care. The older man—he with the tanned, lined face and the gun on his hip—is pulling the cart they call Ho Fat II. The younger one—he with the oversized drawing pad tucked under his arm that makes him look like a student in days of old—is walking along beside it. They are climbing a long, gently upsloping hill not much different from hundreds of others they have climbed. The overgrown road they follow is lined on either side with the remains of rock walls; wild roses grow in amiable profusion amid the tumbles of fieldstone. In the open, brush-dotted land beyond these fallen walls are strange stone edifices. Some look like the ruins of castles; others have the appearance of Egyptian obelisks; a few are clearly Speaking Rings of the sort where demons may be summoned; one ancient ruin of stone pillars and plinths has the look of Stone-henge. One almost expects to see hooded Druids gathered in the center of that great circle, perhaps casting the runes, but the keepers of these monuments, these precursors of the Great Monument, are all gone. Only small herds of bannock graze where once they worshipped.

Never mind. It’s not old ruins we’ve come to observe near the end of our long journey, but the old gunslinger pulling the handles of the cart. We stand at the crest of the hill and wait as he comes toward us. He comes. And comes. Relentless as ever, a man who always learns to speak the language of the land (at least some of it) and the customs of the country; he is still a man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. Much about him has changed, but not that. He crests the hill, so close to us now that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. He looks up, a quick and automatic glance he shoots first ahead and then to either side as he tops any hill—Always con yer vantage was Cort’s rule, and the last of his pupils has still not forgotten it. He looks up without interest, looks down… and stops. After a moment of staring at the broken, weed-infested paving of the road, he looks up again, more slowly this time. Much more slowly. As if in dread of what he thinks he has seen.

And it’s here we must join him—sink into him—although how we will ever con the vantage of Roland’s heart at such a moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell. Some moments are beyond imagination.

Two

Roland glanced up quickly as he topped the hill, not because he expected trouble but because the habit was too deeply ingrained to break. Always con yer vantage, Cort had told them, drilling it into their heads from the time when they had been little more than babbies. He looked back down at the road—it was becoming more and more difficult to swerve among the roses without crushing any, although he had managed the trick so far—and then, belatedly, realized what he had just seen.

What you thought you saw, Roland told himself, still looking down at the road. It’s probably just another of the strange ruins we’ve been passing ever since we started moving again.

But even then Roland knew it wasn’t so. What he’d seen was not to either side of the Tower Road, but dead ahead.

He looked up again, hearing his neck creak like hinges in an old door, and there, still miles ahead but now visible on the horizon, real as roses, was the top of the Dark Tower. That which he had seen in a thousand dreams he now saw with his living eyes. Sixty or eighty yards ahead, the road rose to a higher hill with an ancient Speaking Ring moldering in the ivy and honeysuckle on one side and a grove of ironwood trees on the other. At the center of this near horizon, the black shape rose in the near distance, blotting out a tiny portion of the blue sky.

Patrick came to a stop beside Roland and made one of his hooting sounds.

“Do you see it?” Roland asked. His voice was dusty, cracked with amazement. Then, before Patrick could answer, the gunslinger pointed to what the boy wore around his neck. In the end, the binoculars had been the only item in Mordred’s little bit of gunna worth taking.

“Give them over, Pat.”

Patrick did, willingly enough. Roland raised them to his eyes, made a minute adjustment to the knurled focus knob, and then caught his breath as the top of the Tower sprang into view, seemingly close enough to touch. How much was visible over the horizon? How much was he looking at? Twenty feet? Perhaps as much as fifty? He didn’t know, but he could see at least three of the narrow slit-windows which ascended the Tower’s barrel in a spiral, and he could see the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring sunshine, the black center seeming to peer back down the binoculars at him like the very Eye of Todash.

Patrick hooted and held out a hand for the binoculars. He wanted his own look, and Roland handed the glasses over without a murmur. He felt light-headed, not really there. It occurred to him that he had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as though he were a dream or a moonbeam. He had sensed something coming, some vast change, and that was what he felt now.

Yonder it is, he thought. Yonder is my destiny, the end of my life’s road. And yet my heart still beats (a little faster than before, ‘tis true), my blood still courses, and no doubt when I bend over to grasp the handles of this becurst cart my back will groan and I may pass a little gas. Nothing at all has changed.

He waited for the disappointment this thought surely presaged—the letdown. It didn’t come. What he felt instead was a queer, soaring brightness that seemed to begin in his mind and then spread to his muscles. For the first time since setting out at mid-morning, thoughts of Oy and Susannah left his mind. He felt free.

Patrick lowered the binoculars. When he turned to Roland, his face was excited. He pointed to the black thumb jutting above the horizon and hooted.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Someday, in some world, some version of you will paint it, along with Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse. That I know, for I’ve seen the proof. As for now, it’s where we must go.”

Patrick hooted again, then pulled a long face. He put his hands to his temples and swayed his head back and forth, like someone who has a terrible headache.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m afraid, too. But there’s no help for it. I have to go there. Would you stay here, Patrick? Stay and wait for me? If you would, I give you leave to do so.”

Patrick shook his head at once. And, just in case Roland didn’t take the point, the mute boy seized his arm in a hard grip. The right hand, the one with which he drew, was like iron.

Roland nodded. Even tried to smile. “Yes,” he said, “that’s fine. Stay with me as long as you like. As long as you understand that in the end I’ll have to go on alone.”

Three

Now, as they rose from each dip and topped each hill, the Dark Tower seemed to spring closer. More of the spiraling windows which ran around its great circumference became visible. Roland could see two steel posts jutting from the top. The clouds which followed the Paths of the two working Beams seemed to flow away from the tips, making a great X-shape in the sky. The voices grew louder, and Roland realized they were singing the names of the world. Of all the worlds. He didn’t know how he could know that, but he was sure of it. That lightness of being continued to fill him up. Finally, as they crested a hill with great stone men marching away to the north on their left (the remains of their faces, painted in some blood-red stuff, glared down upon them), Roland told Patrick to climb up into the cart. Patrick looked surprised. He made a series of hooting noises Roland took to mean But aren’t you tired?

“Yes, but I need an anchor, even so. Without one I’m apt to start running toward yonder Tower, even though part of me knows better. And if plain old exhaustion doesn’t burst my heart, the Red King’s apt to take my head off with one of his toys. Get in, Patrick.”

Patrick did so. He rode sitting hunched forward, with the binoculars pressed against his eyes.

Four

Three hours later, they came to the foot of a much steeper hill. It was, Roland’s heart told him, the last hill. Can’-Ka No Rey was beyond. At the top, on the right, was a cairn of boulders that had once been a small pyramid. What remained stood about thirty feet high. Roses grew around its base in a rough crimson ring. Roland set this in his sights and took the hill slowly, pulling the cart by its handles. As he climbed, the top of the Dark Tower once more appeared. Each step brought a greater length of it into view. Now he could see the balconies with their waist-high railings. There was no need of the binoculars; the air was preternaturally clear. He put the distance remaining at no more than five miles. Perhaps only three. Level after level rose before his not-quite-disbelieving eye.

Just shy of this hill’s top, with the crumbling rock pyramid twenty paces ahead of them on the right, Roland stopped, bent, and set the handles of the cart on the road for the last time. Every nerve in his body spoke of danger.

“Patrick? Hop down.”

Patrick did so, looking anxiously into Roland’s face and hooting.

The gunslinger shook his head. “I can’t say why just yet. Only it’s not safe.” The voices sang in a great chorus, but the air around them was still. Not a bird soared overhead or sang in the distance. The wandering herds of bannock had all been left behind. A breeze soughed around them, and the grasses rippled. The roses nodded their wild heads.

The two of them walked on together, and as they did, Roland felt a timid touch against the side of his two-fingered right hand. He looked at Patrick. The mute boy looked anxiously back, trying to smile. Roland took his hand, and they crested the hill in that fashion.

Below them was a great blanket of red that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The road cut through it, a dusty white line perfectly straight and perhaps twelve feet wide. In the middle of the rose-field stood the sooty dark gray Tower, just as it had stood in his dreams; its windows gleamed in the sun. Here the road split and made a perfect white circle around the Tower’s base to continue on the other side, in a direction Roland believed was now dead east instead of south-by-east. Another road ran off at right angles to the Tower Road: to the north and south, if he was right in believing that the points of the compass had been re-established. From above, the Dark Tower would look like the center of a blood-filled gunsight.

“It’s—” Roland began, and then a great, crazed shriek floated to them on the breeze, weirdly undiminished by the distance of miles. It comes on the Beam, Roland thought. And it’s carried by the roses.

“GUNSLINGER!” screamed the Crimson King. “NOW YOU DIE!”

There was a whistling sound, thin at first and then growing, cutting through the combined song of the Tower and the roses like the keenest blade ever ground on a wheel dusted with diamonds. Patrick stood transfixed, peering dumbly at the Tower; he would have been blown out of his boots if not for Roland, whose reflexes were as quick as ever. He pulled the mute boy behind the heaped stone of the pyramid by their joined hands. There were other stones hidden in the high grass of dock and jimson; they stumbled over these and went sprawling. Roland felt the corner of one digging painfully into his ribs.

The whistle continued to rise, becoming an earsplitting whine. Roland saw a golden something flash past in the air—one of the sneetches. It struck the cart and it blew up, scattering their gunna every which way. Most of the stuff settled back to the road, cans rattling and bouncing, some of them burst.

Then came high, chattering laughter that set Roland’s teeth on edge; beside him, Patrick covered his ears. The lunacy in that laughter was almost unbearable.

“COME OUT!” urged that distant, mad, laughing voice. “COME OUT AND PLAY, ROLAND! COME TO ME! COME TO YOUR TOWER, AFTER ALL THE LONG YEARS WILL YOU NOT?”

Patrick looked at him, his eyes desperate and frightened. He was holding his drawing pad against his chest like a shield.

Roland peered carefully around the edge of the pyramid, and there, on a balcony two levels up from the Tower’s base, he saw exactly what he had seen in sai Sayre’s painting: one blob of red and three blobs of white; a face and two upraised hands. But this was no painting, and one of the hands moved rapidly forward in a throwing gesture and there came another hellish, rising whine. Roland rolled back against the tumble of the pyramid. There was a pause that seemed endless, and then the sneetch struck the pyramid’s other side and exploded. The concussion threw them forward onto their faces. Patrick screamed in terror. Rocks flew to either side in a spray. Some of them rattled down on the road, but Roland saw not a single piece of shrapnel strike so much as a single rose.

The boy scrambled to his knees and would have run—likely back into the road—but Roland grabbed him by the collar of his hide coat and yanked him down again.

“We’re safe enough here,” he murmured to Patrick. “Look.” He reached into a hole revealed by the falling rock, knocked on the interior with his knuckles, produced a dull ringing noise, and showed his teeth in a strained grin. “Steel! Yar! He can hit this thing with a dozen of his flying fireballs and not knock it down. All he can do is blast away the rocks and blocks and expose what lies beneath. Kennit? And I don’t think he’ll waste his ammunition. He can’t have much more than a donkey’s carry.”

Before Patrick could reply, Roland peered around the pyramid’s ragged edge once more. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed: “TRY AGAIN, SAI! WE’RE STILL HERE, BUT PERHAPS YOUR NEXT THROW WILL BE LUCKY!”

There was a moment of silence, then an insane scream: “EEEEEEEEEEE! YOU DON’T DARE MOCK ME! YOU DON’T DARE! EEEEEEEEEEE!”

Now came another of those rising whistles. Roland grabbed Patrick and fell on top of him, behind the pyramid but not against it. He was afraid it might vibrate hard enough when the sneetch struck to give them concussion injuries, or turn their soft insides to jelly.

Only this time the sneetch didn’t strike the pyramid. It flew past it instead, soaring above the road. Roland rolled off Patrick and onto his back. His eyes picked up the golden blur and marked the place where it buttonhooked back toward its targets. He shot it out of the air like a clay plate. There was a blinding flash and then it was gone.

“OH DEAR, STILL HERE!” Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement into his voice. It wasn’t easy when you were screaming at the top of your lungs.

Another crazed scream in response—“EEEEEEEEE!” Roland was amazed that the Red King didn’t split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded the chamber he’d emptied—he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he could—and this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rock-strewn grass, covering his head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting. At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes wanted water in response to that high, approaching whistle, and he must not let them. If he ever needed the preternaturally keen eyesight for which he’d been famous in his time, this was it.

Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference. Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled with all the world’s clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day, he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his eyes.

He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars, braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland saw exactly what he had imagined: an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that spilled down the Crimson King’s back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom. His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate.

“HOW SLOW YOU ARE!” the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. “TRY THREE, PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!”

Looking into the binoculars was like looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure’s feet, but wasn’t entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony’s floor and its railing obscured it.

Must be his ammunition supply, he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size? Twenty? Fifty? It didn’t matter. Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at a time, Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what he’d been made for.

Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did.

The thing on the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition. Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony’s railing… and then peer directly into the gunslinger’s eyes. That glare was red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.

The King’s call drifted to him. “WAIT THEN, A BIT—AND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOU’D GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND… LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR DARLING SINGS!”

He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind… and what the King wanted him to hear.

The call of the Tower.

Come, Roland, sang the voices. They came from the roses of Can’-Ka No Rey, they came from the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself, that for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach… that which was being held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it, he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do his work if he only waited. And as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because the calling voices weren’t constant. At their current level he could withstand them. Was withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, the level of the call grew stronger. He began to understand—and with growing horror—why in his dreams and visions he had always seen himself coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky seemed to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood held up by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning horizon.

He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the Tower’s strengthening call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go. No power on Earth would be able to stop him.

Come… come… became COME… COME… and then COME! COME! His head ached with it. And for it. Again and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself to sit down once more with his back against the pyramid.

Patrick was staring at him with growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to that call—Roland understood this—but he knew what was happening.

Five

They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to be an hour when the King tried another pair of sneetches. This time they flew on either side of the pyramid and hooked back almost at once, coming at him in perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took the one on the right, snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air, but at least there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it seemed.

“TRY AGAIN!” he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew the words were carrying—the air in this place was made for such communication. And he knew each one was a dagger pricking the old lunatic’s flesh. But he had his own problems. The call of the Tower was growing steadily stronger.

“COME, GUNSLINGER!” the madman’s voice coaxed. “PERHAPS I’LL LET THEE COME, AFTER ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT, COULD WE NOT?”

To his horror, Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice.

Yes, he thought grimly. And we’ll have coffee. Perhaps even a little fry-up.

He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands were running briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his eyes, but that was worse. The call of the Tower

(come, Roland come, gunslinger, commala-come-come, now the journey’s done)

was louder, more insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the unforgiving blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the end of the rose-field.

And the torture continued.

Six

He hung on for another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near the pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that something would occur to him, some brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his fate in the hands of the talented but soft-minded boy by his side. But as the sun began to slide down the western arc of the sky and the blue overhead began to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The hands of the pocket-watch were turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning. And when they began to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might the madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zig-zag, he would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did, he knew he would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower before he was blown out of his boots.

He would die among the roses.

“Patrick,” he said. His voice was husky.

Patrick looked up at him with desperate intensity. Roland stared at the boy’s hands—dirty, scabbed, but in their way as incredibly talented as his own—and gave in. It occurred to him that he’d only held out as long as this from pride; he had wanted to kill the Crimson King, not merely send him into some null zone. And of course there was no guarantee that Patrick could do to the King what he’d done to the sore on Susannah’s face. But the pull of the Tower would soon be too strong to resist, and all his other choices were gone.

“Change places with me, Patrick.”

Patrick did, scrambling carefully over Roland. He was now at the edge of the pyramid nearest the road.

“Look through the far-seeing instrument. Lay it in that notch—yes, just so—and look.”

Patrick did, and for what seemed to Roland a very long time. The voice of the Tower, meanwhile, sang and chimed and cajoled. At long last, Patrick looked back at him.

“Now take thy pad, Patrick. Draw yonder man.” Not that he was a man, but at least he looked like one.

At first, however, Patrick only continued to gaze at Roland, biting his lip. Then, at last, he took the sides of the gunslinger’s head in his hands and brought it forward until they were brow to brow.

Very hard, whispered a voice deep in Roland’s mind. It was not the voice of a boy at all, but of a grown man. A powerful man. He’s not entirely there. He darkles. He tincts.

Where had Roland heard those words before?

No time to think about it now.

“Are you saying you can’t?” Roland asked, injecting (with an effort) a note of disappointed incredulity into his voice. “That you can’t? That Patrick can’t? The Artist can’t?”

Patrick’s eyes changed. For a moment Roland saw in them the expression that would be there permanently if he grew to be a man… and the paintings in Sayre’s office said that he would do that, at least on some track of time, in some world. Old enough, at least, to paint what he had seen this day. That expression would be hauteur, if he grew to be an old man with a little wisdom to match his talent; now it was only arrogance. The look of a kid who knows he’s faster than blue blazes, the best, and cares to know nothing else. Roland knew that look, for had he not seen it gazing back at him from a hundred mirrors and still pools of water when he had been as young as Patrick Danville was now?

I can, came the voice in Roland’s head. I only say it won’t be easy. I’ll need the eraser.

Roland shook his head at once. In his pocket, his hand closed around what remained of the pink nubbin and held it tight.

“No,” he said. “Thee must draw cold, Patrick. Every line right the first time. The erasing comes later.”

For a moment the look of arrogance faltered, but only for a moment. When it returned, what came with it pleased the gunslinger mightily, and eased him a little, as well. It was a look of hot excitement. It was the look the talented wear when, after years of just moving sleepily along from pillar to post, they are finally challenged to do something that will tax their abilities, stretch them to their limits. Perhaps even beyond them.

Patrick rolled to the binoculars again, which he’d left propped aslant just below the notch. He looked long while the voices sang their growing imperative in Roland’s head.

And at last he rolled away, took up his pad, and began to draw the most important picture of his life.

Seven

It was slow work compared to Patrick’s usual method—rapid strokes that produced a completed and compelling drawing in only minutes. Roland again and again had to restrain himself from shouting at the boy: Hurry up! For the sake of all the gods, hurry up! Can’t you see that I’m in agony here?

But Patrick didn’t see and wouldn’t have cared in any case. He was totally absorbed in his work, caught up in the unknowing greed of it, pausing only to go back to the binoculars now and then for another long look at his red-robed subject. Sometimes he slanted the pencil to shade a little, then rubbed with his thumb to produce a shadow. Sometimes he rolled his eyes back in his head, showing the world nothing but the waxy gleam of the whites. It was as if he were conning some version of the Red King that stood a-glow in his brain. And really, how did Roland know that was not possible?

I don’t care what it is. Just let him finish before I go mad and sprint to what the Old Red King so rightly called “my darling.”

Half an hour at least three days long passed in this fashion. Once the Crimson King called more coaxingly than ever to Roland, asking if he would not come to the Tower and palaver, after all. Perhaps, he said, if Roland were to free him from his balcony prison, they might bury an arrow together and then climb to the top room of the Tower in that same spirit of friendliness. It was not impossible, after all. A hard rain made for queer bedfellows at the inn; had Roland never heard that saying?

The gunslinger knew the saying well. He also knew that the Red King’s offer was essentially the same false request as before, only this time dressed up in morning coat and cravat. And this time Roland heard worry lurking in the old monster’s voice. He wasted no energy on reply.

Realizing his coaxing had failed, the Crimson King threw another sneetch. This one flew so high over the pyramid it was only a spark, then dove down upon them with the scream of a falling bomb. Roland took care of it with a single shot and reloaded from a plentitude of shells. He wished, in fact, that the King would send more of the flying grenados against him, because they took his mind temporarily off the dreadful call of the Tower.

It’s been waiting for me, he thought with dismay. That’s what makes it so hard to resist, I think—it’s calling me in particular. Not to Roland, exactly, but to the entire line of Eld… and of that line, only I am left.

Eight

At last, as the descending sun began to take on its first hues of orange and Roland felt he could stand it no longer, Patrick put his pencil aside and held the pad out to Roland, frowning. The look made Roland afraid. He had never seen that particular expression in the mute boy’s repertoire. Patrick’s former arrogance was gone.